Satellite High: The Best SF MC You Haven’t Heard—Until Now.

ML Exclusive: Read to the end of the interview to hear tracks from Satellite High and read what he has to say about some of his music.

It’s Friday, Labor Day weekend in the Mission. There’s a party going on at Public Works, the gallery-space-slash-performance-venue on Erie Ave. I’m headed to see Satellite High, aka Jay Friedman. I hear he’s a badass MC.

Turns out he is.

Satellite is the second of three acts. He comes on after the amount of time it takes to finish a beer and maybe smoke a jazz cigarette. He is a rapper that you probably wouldn’t mistake for a rapper. He’s up there in an SF hat and a t-shirt with a pastel colored slice of pizza on the front. He sometimes wears red glasses and has a huge, wavy Brian Wilson rally beard. He looks like he was spawned in the depths of the Lower Haight.

His neck muscles strain when he’s getting into it. He’s got the crowd. Him and the DJ are doing their thing, and that thing includes rhymes rehearsed to a T. At one point Jay clowns around and asks the audience to buy him shots. Someone does. The shot glasses are plastic. He tosses back both shots he’s handed and thanks the crowd, warmly. Later he tells me that nobody had bought him shots on stage before. I doubt it will be the last time.

Girls in mini skirts and wedge heels stand next to guys with clean-looking haircuts. Nearby it’s denim jackets standing next to hoodies and scarves. Off to the side it’s black mini dresses and tall black boots standing next to no one. Some dudes in contemporary sport coats wander in late. In a group, of course. This is what a young Google crowd and its periphery looks like.

Jay Friedman though, stands out from the normal SF computer-profession flock. Yes, he’s a 33-year-old web programmer who specializes in user interface during the day. But at night and on the weekends, it’s all music. Jay produces his own beats, and not just from samples. He plays standup bass, guitar, accordion, drums, and has “weird noise-making shit” strewn about his studio. All of which goes into his music. TO READ MORE AND LISTEN TO SATELLITE HIGH’S MUSIC, CLICK HERE